To Drown A Grieving Soul
by dont-fear-the-reaper11
Summary: "Not human anymore," I decided. That was it, Derek was human before, broken. Cracked like a pocket watch. Now he was reinforced steel.
1. Drowning 1

*1*

Things were never casual. Not with Derek. I was permanently stuck in a state of the heaviest fear and the deepest curiosity, since September. What was today? How long had I been half-asleep and faltering?

That's right, it was halfway through November. Had I already stumbled deftly through two and a half months? I tried to remember the last real lungful I took without worrying about something hearing it. Hearing me. And although I was currently stuck literally and figuratively between two solid objects, drowning in darkness, and unable to open my eyes, I was still trying to be quiet. The fear was there because it was always there.

I was boneless right now and it felt so good that I couldn't question it. Aside from my burning eyelids. My dry mouth. The stench surrounding me; my natural habitat. I belonged here, somewhere disgusting and dark. It fit, after all, that as my mind went to shit, so did my atmosphere._ I could float in this disaster forever_, I told myself.

The state of unconsciousness. I thought of it as "The" state, because it was always the same for me. Disorienting, but after the fact I would surprise myself with how much I could articulate in my swimming mind. Any ounce of intelligence left behind my complaining wall of skull had scurried into boats to stay afloat, tied back the sails, hurling buckets of water overboard as final attempts at coherence. Today, right now, it seemed, it was less of a storm and more of a flood. Perhaps my usual snippets of thought had drowned already.

_Oh._

I thought I moaned, because all of a sudden my heart rate rocketed, shaking my whole body. _Don't make a sound_, I hissed at myself, holding my breath and attempting to still my body. It wasn't difficult, as I seemed to already be crammed in tightly.

It was just overwhelmingly painful for a moment, and took too much will-power to pinpoint what exactly throbbed and who made a noise. I tried to fan away the fog, tread the inflow of water like a champ. _Batten down the hatches, it's a rough one today. _

My eyes flickered open and I was thrust into a whole new state of utter confusion. It didn't seem to matter whether I kept my eyes shut or not, there was still blackness. Between the magnified stench of decaying bread crumbs and the fact that I couldn't see anything, I considered the fact that I'd died. It was momentary relief, honestly, the only theoretical flaw my full body ache. My arms felt sticky, my first instinct that I was covered in blood. _A little too "The Hills Have Eyes"._

I could picture it, though. Derek finally deciding that I was too much of a nuisance, cramming me into a locked box filled with the severed limbs of his previous victims. Did dead bodies smell like mouldy bread?

I could've sworn that I'd just been sleeping, had come home and gone to bed. But it occurred to me that I wasn't as horizontal as I thought, my feet under me and touching something solid. Moving was my next objective, but I couldn't roll over. There was no mattress under me. No glimmer of moonlight through curtains adjacent to my bed.

_Panic._

Whether it was the sudden realization that I couldn't remember where I'd been last or the lightning bolt of pain behind my eyes, I stopped thinking and slumped once again, my world insulated so everything was a dull hum.

*2*

And that was exactly what I heard for the longest time: a dull hum. It was such a secondary sound, muffled and fuzzy, my ossicles refused to pass it along. It was either getting closer, or I was waking up again, because I heard the words 'mother-fucker' very briefly. It was followed with a rather startling string of vocabulary that could stop a nun's heart. I thought I recognized the voice but I'd never heard it swear before. I wanted it to go away. I said I could live here forever, I never agreed to co-exist.

There was such a long, loud scraping noise above my head that I wanted to cry out, hold my head, burrow deeper into wherever I was. Instead what I got was an amplified sailor, continuing his foul-mouthed rant as a hand grabbed me under each shoulder and tore me away from my only source of comfort. I was in a very sudden amount of pain that blurred my thought process again. I didn't like his hands. They were rough and unforgiving, not like the peaceful ones holding me in the stillness a moment ago.

After a few seconds, I realized I was on my feet, yet supporting zero weight. The hands were still there, _on_ each shoulder this time and supporting everything that would've made my legs wobble. Maybe they weren't actually a terrible thing. I blinked and saw black in front of me, standing very close and reaching out. That was it, just the towering silhouette and pressure on each shoulder.

"Stiles."

_Mmhh?_ I tried to murmur in response, but I may have just swallowed and blinked.

The hands let me go just a little bit, allowing me to sway and regain balance. _Cue the nausea_.

My back was against a wall and everything was starting to become a few shades brighter. I could see the outline of the face in front of mine, the hands that belonged to it gliding down from my shoulders to my torso. They ran gently over my ribs, and I jerked away when one on my left side screamed in protest. I heard a voice mutter a few things but my ears were pounding in response to the pulsing pain.

I pushed away the hand that had pinpointed my angry rib and placed my own hand on top, trying to soothe it. Apologize to it. There were hands other than mine on either side of my face now, but not in the intimate way it was usually done. My head was turned involuntarily to the right and I felt another throb of pain travel through a network of nerves that made a trip around my entire brain.

"What else hurts?" The same voice asked, but it wasn't angry this time, it was quiet and thoughtful.

I shrugged sleepily and tried to really look at the person holding me upright against the cement bricks. His face cleared. "Derek?"


	2. Drowning 2

oh, ps: the whole random italics thing during internal dialogue = thought snippet of the present character's point of view. okyeah.

*3*

Pre-October, I'd been terrified of Derek, but the fear butted heads with my association of him and my life being saved. Post-October, there was no more of that association. He was completely different in every sense of the word. There was no more guilt, modesty, empathy, or anything else that could really be considered a human trait. I used to be able to see emotion sprint across his face once in a while at Scott's mention, or even mine sometimes. It was gone.

"Not human anymore," I decided. That was it, he was human before, broken. _Cracked like a pocket watch._ Now he was just reinforced steel.

"Wha-? No, Stiles, what happened?" He asked, but his tone of voice suggested he already knew.

"Mmnngh," I muttered, still holding my rib and trying to look around. If the world would just stop spinning…

We were in an alley. _And very alone._

Derek exhaled suddenly before changing his posture into a more strained one. "What do you remember?"

I wanted to tell him that he could fake being patient better if he would unclench his teeth. "I liked it better in there," I slurred, gesturing lazily at what appeared to be a large green dumpster.

"And we're done here," Derek sighed, putting his hands on his hips and glancing at the pavement. I wondered if he knew he just quoted me. "What'll it be? Hospital?"

"Why," I thought aloud, squeezing my eyes shut. Seriously, if I didn't get a handle on this all-encompassing throb of pain I was going to hurl.

"Your head."

"Woa- No," I tried to say with resolve. "No, dude, I'm good, okay?" My eyes were almost clear enough to see his frown lines. A good sign.

"You aren't."

There was no way I was going to a hospital. If for no other reason, Scott's mother would probably finish the job with that baseball bat and my dad would later show to merrily take my measurements for a coffin. I just needed to go home and sleep for a while before my dad got home, I may have vocalized.

It seemed like a great idea so I began digging through my pocket for my car keys, which were promptly snatched upon retrieval. Groping sluggishly at Derek's hand, I moaned my disapproval.

"You can't sleep unsupervised. Ever learn about concussions?" _Hello, Derek's sarcastic voice. It's been a while_.

I lined up a killer retort but had to extinguish it when another small wave of blackness hit me. I re-plastered my back to the wall and shut my eyes against the humming, waiting for balance to be once again attainable. Instead what I got was a firm hand gripping the back of my collar, hauling me away from the wall. I wasn't even sure that what I was doing could constitute as walking, more like blindly stumbling.

Breathing Derek's name in a weak protest, I tried to ground my feet. As a response, a hand was placed in the small of my back and I was being propelled. "We're going."

"No!" I shouted, recognizing the dark blob in front of us as Derek's car. "No, I'm not going to a hospital. Just finish me off," _Don't say it, Stiles,_ "like you asked your girlfriend to."

In my defense, I was concussed.

He handled the comment much better than I would've thought, throwing me into the passenger seat roughly. Nothing new hurt as a result, but the momentary loss of balance made my head swim and inner ears whine. I gripped the seat tightly and fought to stay afloat in my lake of consciousness.

"What'd she hit you with?"

"A car part," I heard myself say before I remembered. _My_ _jeep,_ I sobbed internally while Derek muttered another short slur of inventive swear words. He fell silent again like he remembered I was there and shut the door after tossing my keys in my lap. Not like I could drive it, anyway.

When the driver's side door slammed shut, I regrouped, grit my teeth, and tried to drive my point home. "Take me to a hospital and I'm flinging myself out of this car before we get there."

Silence to the left coaxed my eyelids to open again and I turned slowly to observe the werewolf beside me. He was looking at me with a permanent frown, like he was in the process of realizing a second, more undesirable option. I knew I won when he sighed, turning the ignition.

I tried not to smirk through my sea-sickness when, as an afterthought, Derek leaned over me to manually lock my door. It was satisfying, the look of uncertain horror on his face. _So human._

*4*

Moving vehicles vs. looming unconsciousness. The only thing I could compare it to would be spinning for three hours in zero-gravity and then attempting to survive on an amusement park ride. I couldn't call it unconsciousness, nor slumber, and decided it was more of an aggressive approach at sleeping. Involuntary and unpreventable. There was no dead hum in my ears, only Styrofoam silence. This kind of silence happened when evening came, skies grayed, and snow fell. As disturbing as it was to my usually busy mind, it didn't come close to the violent tremor that passed through my body now.

Flailing, I tried to brace myself for a crash, a fall, only realizing after an embarrassing three seconds that I was on a soft surface. Lying down already. A groan, a grimace of pain, and fear. _Shhhh_, I reminded myself over my thudding heart.

Sitting up suddenly and forcing the blood to rush from my head was unpleasant. More unpleasant was looking for the source of my startlement.

Isaac fucking Lahey sat back in a chair at the end of the mattress I'd been placed on, reading a magazine with one foot on the frame of the cot.

"_What the hell-_" I paused, trying and failing to make a quick decision in regards to ending that question. _What the hell_- am I doing here? –are you doing here? –are we doing here? –is going on? –did you wake me up for?

Or maybe more appropriate would've been, 'Where the fucking bloody hell am I?'

The smug little bastard just let his magazine quiver and fold over on itself, eyes burning mine. He may have looked bored without the semi-permanent left-eyebrow quirk. "Derek's orders."

He hissed the words. It was obvious he loathed the task, but I wouldn't have expected him to ask Erica to watch me in-

Well. Wherever we were.

"Where the hell-"

"-Go back to sleep."

"I-"

"-_Sleep._"

The snort of amusement out of Isaac, as a manly fainting spell hit me from standing up defiantly before promptly collapsing back onto the mattress, was uncalled for.

*5* _-Hours before-_

Derek had little patience left to deal with an angry teenager. Another angry teenager on top of all the angry ones he already housed. Another angry, persistent teenager with cavernous wounds that would take a human amount of time to heal- that he inflicted. At that moment, adjacent to an unconscious Stiles, Derek didn't know who he was more disgusted with; Scott and his lack of logical reasoning or Erica and her natural tendency towards violence.

He should throw himself in there as well, he thought. He and his conscience.

There were few options: Derek wheeling an unwilling, concussed, possibly (newly) self-harmed adolescent into a hospital whose entire staff would know him anywhere, not to mention Stiles, Derek leaving him with Scott who may or may not be unconscious at this point as well, taking him home and nursing bullet wounds for the evening, or-

He sighed. Or take him to the only safe place he knew of.

*6* _-the present-_

"Every two hours."

I was floating this time, not dreaming. There was white noise but it was so distant that I could focus on the immediate peace and quiet. This was like the dumpster but soft and with less self-loathing. Nothing hurt, throbbed, moaned, seared, for a change, and yes; this was definitely what death was like.

_Quiet. Distant. Solitary._

A loud scrape, an earthquake later, and I was flailing again.

"Whhmmnng," I trembled, hand gripping a cool metal bar behind me in an attempt to stay afloat. Stay afloat? Perhaps I'd been dreaming after all.

Through persistently burning eyes, I made out Isaac at the foot of the cot I had to remind myself I was still on, not in my room or crammed between two trash bags and what felt like a small discarded statue. He was sitting in the very same position, foot resting against the bed that he must've just nudged- and I was using 'nudge' in a very watered down sense- left eyebrow quirk still a-blazin'. He was watching me re-remember everything with a revolting smirk.

This time I stood slowly. It was easier to see everything from here, the large room with two long concrete walls, dozens of wooden pillars, and rows of hanging, ominous lights. They cast a dim and unfriendly yellow in every direction, capturing the floating dust in the air. The quiet, distant, solitary dust that was probably more than happy to just float up there. Suspended and res-

Right, time for an escape plan. "So," I said conversationally, leaning against the cot's metal frame to stop myself from tipping over with the sudden adrenaline rush. It was my best attempt at nonchalance. "New hideout, eh? Is this even legal, or is prohibited squatting Derek's new thing?"

The corner of Isaac's mouth only crept higher up his face as he jerked his head to my right, eyes growing cold. "Ask him."


	3. Drowning 3

Guys I feel totally pathetic updating this with one review ._.

*7*

September had been a nightmare. Almost dying, Scott being bitten, Peter's power trip, almost dying, the Argents' re-involvement, killing Peter, and almost dying. Those were only the high lights. Each roadblock knocked the wind out of Derek, an arrow to the chest, but each one had been fixable. Tolerable. _Livable_.

There was one thing, though, that he still hadn't recovered from. Killing one of the few remaining Hales was what Derek assumed he would have the most trouble with after the fact, but what really kept him awake at night was his home. The rough husk of a building, filled now with the smell of the Argents. He kept coming back to see if they left, but there was always someone there. Always waiting.

A few months ago, it wouldn't have bothered him that he couldn't visit the home anymore. Almost six years of absence had been enough to break any self-destructive urge to return, but Beacon Hills recently became semi-permanent. With that came a perpetual itch, a symptom of infectious grief.

It was November 14th, and Derek didn't know what to do with himself. In a week, November 21, would mark the arrival of a royal fuck-up, a day he had no idea how he was going to spend. The plan had been so simple at the beginning of September: Fly to California, get Laura, return in time to resume his semester.

_She's an alpha_, he remembered thinking. _What could possibly go wrong?_

The last five November 21st's were also nightmares. Each year he had a different game plan, but all five ended the same. He and Laura would sit in the dark together, utterly silent, and fall asleep that way. It was a ritual.

Tacked onto that ritual was his sister's annual suggestion. "We should fly back to see Peter," Laura would say every year, but they never visited once.

So they would sit, and they would mourn, and the collaborative grief in the room was agony. Kate's name never came up, although Derek was certain Laura knew. It was the way she looked at him, always with the same sadness in her eyes like she understood. She never blamed him and it fueled Derek's guilt. It burned and burned and burned until he was just ashes the next day.

Months of effort this year to push aside knowledge of the looming date was canceled in one week. His mind began to wander old paths, and there was no Laura to notice or steer him away. He was never meant to be an _alpha_. The determination it took not to just leave California after Peter died- he refused to call it murder- was a joke, his attempt to reconstruct a pack with cracked souls. It took everything to choose each member based on their devastated, empty-shell status instead of creating shadows of his former pack. Even when he chose the guideline, broken humans, there was a lack of certainty. Always a lack of certainty. It was a funny thing, trusting oneself.

There were conversations before, when the two siblings were in New York, about adding members. A two-man pack was sad, and it was weak, but there was a certain element of magic in living like a human. It was a change, so it was decided and that was what they did. City living, school, _friends_. The word 'werewolf' began to feel unnatural. The name 'Hale' hadn't really been mentioned for years and that was how they survived. No matter how poisonous it felt to live that way, Laura had Derek, and Derek had Laura.

_Had._

This fucking warehouse. It smelled worse than the remains of his home. He'd been to every corner, tried not to smell the life leaving it, being driven away by his pathetic attempt to replace the last person he loved, in his countless hours of pacing. That's really all he ever did anymore, pace, thinking about what the hell he was doing, constructing ways to keep his new, not to mention ungrateful, family alive. Trying not to see Laura in every brick.

From directly below him, Derek felt a few small vibrations. He stopped pacing and glanced down, as if the floor would give 'way and he could see what was going on. Stiles wasn't a peaceful sleeper, apparently.

A short flight of stairs later and Derek was reminding an apathetic Isaac that Stiles had to wake up every couple hours. "It's not about _the human_," Derek repeated with an acidic tone, "it's about preserving innocent lives. That's what we do."

None of them listened yet, but they would. Derek of all people knew that trust was a joke and Isaac's sense of it was especially premature. However even now, he shook off the arrogant expression that often clung to his eyebrows and lay the magazine down on his thigh. Eye contact was forced and uncomfortable, a sign of understanding. The way Isaac looked at his alpha now reminded him of the teenager's fear in the graveyard, how unraveled he was when he told Derek about his father, and the undying loyalty when he was finally bitten.

"Every two hours," Derek reminded him quietly.

*8*

In movies, when the hero's clobbered over the head with something, their recovery always looked like cake. The reality of a bad concussion was that it took _days_ to feel even remotely normal. I was stricken with bland guilt at omitting the events of a few days prior to my father. The number of times he'd graced me with lectures on the importance of hospital visits when it came to cranial injury, although always in relevance to lacrosse, was approaching infinity and I still ignored it. The logic of it was simple if one considered the horrifying amount of supernatural information I withheld in the past few months. What was literally one more omittance?

A seventy-two hour dream. That was the closest analogy I could come up with. Thinking back to when Derek plucked me from the dumpster, I still wasn't sure if it really happened. Retrieving me and watching me for a night to ensure I didn't slip into the most ironic coma known to man was an uncharacteristically conscience-filled act that Derek didn't have in him. I must have shuffled through a hundred ulterior motives during those precious moments of consciousness, but none of them were satisfying. The only person I was really useful to in a big picture sense was Scott, who took a curious interest in anything except researching his furry little problem.

In the spirit of problems, I knew I was one of Derek's many. Which was why, frankly, I found it impossible to believe his 'innocent parties must remain uninvolved' code. I wasn't innocent; I was an obstacle.

So I moved on, and I slept.

Lately, the act of waking up and going to school was my main source of ironic humour. The hierarchy of priorities in my life mutated beyond recognition before my own eyes in two and a half months. How it came to be that I would almost lose my life one evening, then wake up to write a chemistry quiz the next morning was beyond me, a natural wonder. I found my face contorting into satirical grimaces when teachers would ask for an incomplete assignment or threaten with detention. _You want to keep me in a secure, heavily monitored room for half an hour? God, no, anything but that._

Honestly though, this morning, I didn't see the humour. My head was _killing_ me, my eyes were twice their usual size and eight shades redder, and my limbs creaked. My body was trying to tell me something.

Perhaps that it longed for the sweet release of death.

_ Clothes._

_ General hygiene._

_ Eye drops._

_ Adderall._

_ Toast? No, Christ, no food._

_ Keys._

_ Car._

_ Retreat to house to collect books._

_ Keys._

_ Car._

_ I'm late._


	4. Drowning 4

What the heck am I even doing with my life, I don't know

*9*

I didn't mean to sound ungrateful, but Scott's new-and-improved-best-friend-forever act was getting old. Ignoring the way my dad stared at me hopping off the ambulance's step in the most klutzy way I knew, I made my way over to Scott's violently stopping vehicle. My dad really had all bases covered._ Take away my jeep and bribe me with my best friend._ He was learning.

Mechanically, it was embarrassingly difficult to pull the door handle and twice as hard to hide my difficulty considering the observant freak of nature in the driver's side. He was concerned, of course, but I got away with explaining the bare minimum of what happened. I'd meant to hide the fact that the lizard seemed to know me, but these things spurted from my mouth like hot lava around this kid.

The way _that thing_ had looked at me- it messed me up. Almost as much as being frozen on the ground and unable to save a slowly dying- albeit douchebag- from being crushed by my baby. _My poor, evidentially relevant, impounded baby._

Helpless wasn't a good look, and certainly not something I was used to.

"So it cut you?" Scott asked once were driving, trying to glance at the back of my neck with nonchalance. The bastard looked fascinated.

"No," I sighed, tugging my collar up. "It left its," _slime? Excrement? Bodily fluids?_ I gestured around a little before deciding on "_Goo_, on a door handle."

"Oh."

_Yeah. Oh._

"Wait, cut? You thought it cut me? How did you know it cut my mechan-"

"Deaton- after the ice rink- man, why haven't you been answering your phone?"

I blinked. "It's only been a couple days, Erica-"

"I-tried-to-get-to-Boyd-in-time-at-the-rink-but-Derek-already-turned-him," burst Scott. Apparently I wasn't the only one housing events that would account for multiple lifetimes of nightmares. "He proceeded to beat the crap out of me." Proceeded. His vocabulary was improving, I noticed fondly, and I owed it all to Allison.

Scott lifted the edge of his shirt to demonstrate but I stopped his hand. "Yeah, no proof needed, Derek beating people is not unheard of."

After a long, brooding pause, he continued. "I went to the clinic to, you know, clean up, but Deaton was there. He knows about werewolves, Stiles. He knows about Derek and the, whatever, lizard. It killed an Argent, I guess. They're pissed."

"Wait, do they know what it is?" They were more useless than Derek and his creepy little pack, if that was the case.

"Didn't sound like it," Scott said, a street light catching a glint in his eyes. I was never going to get used to the auburn-werewolf-eyes thing. "They were trying to, I don't know, threaten my boss into telling them." He quickly added, "And no, he doesn't know what it is either," when I opened my mouth to blurt the question.

We pulled into the driveway, the terribly empty driveway, unfortunately void of a police cruiser, and Scott parked, staring at me with owl-wide eyes. "Stiles, this is bad."

I snorted in startled, scoffing laughter, turning to face him. "Tfffd- YEAH, it's bad. Thank you, Captain Obv-"

"-I'm going to talk to Allison about this tonight," his eyes darted ominously from mine to the car's clock, "and I'll talk to you tomorrow."

I took a moment to pause, wondering how the Hell either of them survived when seeing each other at night in a forest was top priority in a world of werewolves and hunters and lizards. It took me an incremental amount of time to get over this fact because I'd been practicing.

Nodding once, I clambered my way from the vehicle, mostly proud of the fact that my ass didn't hit the pavement when my legs shook. A side effect of watching murder.

"Stiles!" Scott called through the open window, and I ducked my head back in. "Are you okay, man? I mean you didn't look so good on the way over here. Or now, for that matter, and I-"

I tapped the sill of the open car window a few times nervously as I said, "Really, I'm fine."

And with that crafty avoidance of a heart blip, there was a mutual nod, and an empty driveway.

*10*

I just wanted to make one thing horrifically clear: I did not want to involve Derek. There was nothing I wanted more than to lie my semi-paralyzed limbs down after Scott left, comforted by the knowledge that every nook and crevice in my house was plugged with something, locked, or wedged shut (by me). And that was the plan at first.

_Sleep,_ I hissed at myself, contorting in my blankets in hopes of finally feeling my fingertips. The pain involved with rediscovering numbed limbs was worse than being physically unaware that areas underneath one's chin didn't exist. I'd liked it better that way.

But I couldn't sleep. _I couldn't. _It wasn't really the pain or the extra dose of medication that kept me up, it was my buzzing mind. I was plagued by the thought that I owed it to those godforsaken werewolves to tell them about the lizard. I'd seen it, up close and personal this time. No one else had yet, and Derek was the only werewolf-born person I knew who had a terrific chance at figuring out what the thing was. The guilt of withholding it crept up my neck and prickled my skin. _What if it murdered again?_

Which was why I ignored my own unwillingness to involve Derek and dialed his fucking phone number. I would've preferred to tell him when I could see him- who invented cell phones anyway?- but I no longer had a vehicle to access his secret warehouse lair that it occurred to me Scott still didn't know about. He would be neck-deep in Allison presently anyway, my phone's clock notifying me that it was half-past ten, so I just sat and listened to the listless rings in my receiver.

It must've been the eighth ring before a female voice picked up. A horrifying millisecond was filled with the thought that Derek changed his number, but I knew that dead tone of voice anywhere.

"Lemme talk to Derek," I said curtly. _Bitch._

Erica cleared her throat. She sounded… guilty? There was a male voice in the background that must've been Boyd's, and Erica muttered, "He's not here."

_Uh. _"Where is he?"

There was a different male voice, fainter and less deep than Boyd's. "We don't know." _Nope, not guilty. _She sounded anxious.

"Look, it's kind of import-"

"-We don't know where he is," Erica spat, and there was a rustling that I realized was her passing the phone off.

"What the hell do you want, Stilinski?" Isaac sneered. I could practically hear his eyebrow quirking.

"God, you know, never fucking mind," I stood up and fought the urge to destroy my phone, "I can't believe I considered coming to _Derek _with this," deciding I could do the self-loathing thing better without an audience. I hung up and contemplated tossing the cell at the wall, but settled for the extremely unsatisfying act of bouncing it into my mattress. "UAGH."

*11*

_Fucking Argents. What the hell do you want?_

Derek put it out of his mind as he meandered towards the large white building he could already hear voices arguing in. He stopped a few feet away from the side entrance with his hand on the smooth metal door frame, pinching the bridge of his nose and ignoring the dull ache in his- well, entire body. If he didn't know better, he would've thought he was coming down with something.

Yes, there was Erica's shrill, unhappy voice; a familiar sound now that they were all forced to get used to. Whining and speaking were the same thing to her.

"-and no one asked him where he was going?" She yelled, heels clicking as she paced.

"Yeah. Yeah that's right, so _naturally_ it's our fault, not yours. You know, Erica, you used to be tolerab-"

"-Will you guys. Shut. The Hell. Up," Boyd roared, and Derek couldn't help but smirk at the deathly silence that followed. The guy was his first really good decision, a _gift_. "Listen."

Derek sighed and scuffed his shoe a little to humour them before sliding into the heavy metal door's opening. _At least they're trying_.

"See? He's back. Now you can calm the fuck down," Isaac barked, mostly at Erica. There had been panic in his voice though, and Derek almost felt warmth, proudness. He was almost proud a lot. But every time, they would do something like-

"Derek!" Erica shouted as he descended down the last flight of steps. "That guy called while you were gone. Stiles."

"When?"

"About an hour ago."

Isaac nodded, "Sounded like he was freaking out. If you really listened to his voice."

Boyd shook his head. "Something must've happened because he said he called to tell us about it. Maybe about that shapeshifter?"

Derek blinked. "Did you ask him?"

Boyd looked at Erica, smugly, before she shook her head.

And this was why Derek would only ever _almost_ be proud.

*12*

It was only midnight but I'd given up on trying to sleep. Sitting in the center of my bed in the most Zen position I knew, I willed my sweat glands to simmer down, noting the t-shirt on the floor I'd soaked in nervousness. I willed my buzzing head to power down, I willed my stinging limbs to nap. The nerves in my fingertips refused to fire correctly and I was stuck with semi-aching, semi-responsive hands. All the while, my heart thudded in my chest, a tribal call to the rest of my body to disobey my attempts at calmness and stay in calamity, at unrest.

But at least there was quietness. No odd bumps in the night, no late-night-pacing-father, who really I wouldn't have minded being home right now, no windy creaks to jump at. Just me, my misbehaving pulse and pure, utter silen-

_Knock-knock-knock._

The trip from my mattress to the floor was apparently a short and painful one and as I pondered how exactly I'd gotten from the center of my bed to mashed into the floorboards, I prided myself on such quick reaction time. One had to learn to appreciate the little things about oneself when a spaz by nature.

_Where did it come from?_ I wondered, peeling myself off the floor shakily and leaning against my bed post. _And why does it want in at 12 o'clock in the _fucking _evening?_

The knock wasn't quiet, but it had been faint enough to be from a floor below. My mind was becoming more rapidly illogical the longer the dead silence persisted, and my initial thought was 'the lizard'. _Finishing the job._

And despite all the flaws in that reasoning, for example that it was knocking, on a door, like a human being, I couldn't put it out of my mind. So I sat on the edge of my bed, cradling my throbbing head as my pulse raced out of control, until there were three more knocks in a row, softer than the last time.

_Okay._

_ Okay._

_ Who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky and it'll be a neighbourhood scumbag here to take all my money._

So I clung to the railing as I took each step nearly silently down to the front door, which I stood in front of for a long time. Waiting for movement, or a sound, or anything that would confirm my fears. Instead what I got was one more irritable knock, an impatient-sounding knock, from something that must've already known I was standing there.

Another anomaly I noticed between movies and real life was the moment of sheer resolution of death, when the hero would see their life flash before their eyes. I didn't see a four-year-old me swinging on a playground swing, pushed by my happy, alive, mother, nor did I see myself in front of a sixth year birthday cake reciting the stupid wish I'd made. Instead what I saw when I removed the chair from the door handle, unbolted the multiple locks and opened the door was that test I failed last week. And what a shallow final regret.

"Stiles?"

I leaned into the door frame, coaxing my lungs to stop constricting and to let some air in while the feeling that I'd been doused in arctic water faded. Derek was trying to ask me what was wrong, but I put a hand up until my vision un-blurred and my palms stopped sweating. No longer in danger of hyperventilation, I let my posture slump.

"Are you trying to kill me?" Was the first thing out of my mouth, and Derek's resulting facial expression, if it had been at any other moment, was borderline hilarious.

He looked around me into my house, and probably noticing the chair whose job had been to barricade the door asked, "What the hell was all that for?"

"Oh, you know," I stalled, still trying to inhale normally. "Murderers."

He continued to study my face like a museum exhibit until I spoke again. "What possessed you to come here at midnight and knock on my front door?" Exasperated was the understatement of the year to describe my voice. "And since when do you use _doors_?"

Derek shifted in discomfort, glancing at my shaking hands which I promptly hid by crossing my arms. He crept his gaze up slowly, back to my eyes. "Your dad's not home, so I thought-" He fell silent.

Clearly I'd thrown him off with my nervous disposition and he was fighting to find the right words. Even to non-werewolf eyes I must've looked shaken. Concerned wasn't the right word, he looked completely freaked out, which was especially interesting to me. If it weren't for my jack-rabbiting heartbeat, I would've marvelled. Since Peter died, there hadn't been an ounce of this in him. In fact I hadn't seen anything at all in him since then, besides smugness and cool indifference. He looked so young this way. Genuine. _Human?_

"Did something happen?" He settled on, asking quietly as he slid his phone from his pocket.

_Ah. So they did go crying to Derek. _

"Is that what they said? Did they forget to mention that they're generally massive pricks, and that I regretted calling?"

Derek's face hardened and lips thinned slightly at that and I suddenly remembered I was talking to post-Peter Derek. AKA apparently-marginally-still-human-but-mostly-indifferent-asshole-Derek, not half-human-half-beta-Derek.

"If you saw something tonight, you need to tell me."

The crack about his pack irked him. _He doesn't want them blamed for these murders, _I realized with a start. _Hello, ulterior motive._

"I didn't."

A thankfully still human hand grabbed the front of my shirt and I was thrust into both a strangely familiar frenzy of panic as well as the wall beside a coat hook. Derek held me there, slamming the door shut with a kick of his heel. It was dark, his eyes were cloaked, but my imagination did all the work for me. I forced myself to look straight ahead instead of cower into the wall like I wanted to.

"_Lie_,_"_ he hissed. And it was.

"Look-"

"I came here to ask nicely," he said, intense, low and quiet through gritted teeth. "I won't ask nicely again. You saw something, what was it?"

_Breathe in…and out…_

"My mechanic die. Paralyzed on the floor," my voice broke a little at 'die'. _Traitor_.

He let me go all at once and turned away to pace a few feet, massaging his face. "You have a couple days to think about it," and he faced me. I wondered if he could see me in this darkness and felt suddenly naked. "But you're going to tell me."


	5. Drowning 5

Eh. I don't mind a small (very, very extremely miniscule in the most non-threateningly tiny and smallest-in-number kind of way) audience. It's more intimate this way, right? Writing this stuff takes a lot out of me, wringing these emotions out and putting them on paper. Very personal indeed.

*13*

The fresh air outside was a welcome relief from the burning smell of chlorine. Hours of it.

Derek walked stiffly, blinking away the pinpricks of heat all over his body as he regained feeling. Being paralyzed from the neck down was an enlightening experience. Kind of poetic justice on a day like today.

_November 21, 2012._

The second worst day of Derek's life.

Retreating from the school, he could still feel water droplets rolling down the small of his back. Annoying, but a good sign. He was also painfully aware of the stony glare fixed on the back of his head from perhaps the most underappreciated teenager in existence.

_ "An abomination," he had said. _

It was kind of disturbing, the way Stiles looked at Derek when he uttered it, like he knew Derek would understand. Like he thought Derek already knew. _Like he knew something?_

And maybe Derek had had theories, but tonight was certainly informative for more than one reason. As he stopped to half-listen to Scott's speech on 'trust', an irony that would usually enrage him, he kept drifting back to Stiles' face. It was _unravelling _him. Unblinking, cold, offended, but curious. Not that he even knew why he cared, but Derek's emotional-well was dried up, spent, cloaking devices disabled indefinitely. It looked like indifference just wasn't happening tonight.

Because Derek was wrecked.

Fortunately, Scott's speech ended quickly with the teenager inhaling heavily, angry clouds dancing in the still, cool air. He was frustrated but unjustly so, and Derek took the opportunity to exit-stage-left.

He said nothing as he retreated with Erica. Scott's determination to fight him at any cost, for any reason, was why they were at such crossroads. The conversation would require exorbitant amounts of energy he barely had on a good day.

And today?

_Not a good day._

As they stalked away, Erica walked too close and let her hand brush against his hip, probably meant as a soothing gesture. He shook her off guiltlessly, ignoring her offence and digging numbly in his pocket for the keys that he thrust at her. She managed to hide almost all enjoyment of getting permission to drive his Camaro as they both got in, the apple of her eye since she was turned.

Both teenagers were still standing in the exact same spot as they drove away, although Stiles appeared less menacing soaked to the bone and with a pool of water branching from his feet onto the pavement. The look on his face was unmistakeable though, and Derek squinted his eyes shut, turning away from the window.

*14*

_No Argents._

Whether they knew the significance of the day's date and cleared out of his home consciously, or got wind of the Kanima in the pool already, Derek didn't care. Flexing his tingling fingers around the steering wheel, hands frozen solid only hours prior, he turned the engine off and rolled down the driver's side window. There wasn't a sound for miles and he closed his eyes to sharpen his hearing further.

Now completely certain, Derek slid out of his car as gracefully as his heavy limbs would allow, wincing at the ache. Cement filled his lungs with every step, and it didn't feel like just weeks since he'd been living here in this burnt piece of shit. The closer he got, the more that feeling returned. The disgusting, filthy, destructive, _loathing, _but most of all that vacant feeling, like it was necessary to hollow himself out to accommodate grief for two.

The way it filled him as he stepped across the threshold of the house felt like pulling barbed wire through flesh. It ripped and tore and he bled everywhere. Footsteps shaky, skin burning, skull twinging. Every year began like this, minus lizard-related injury, but he couldn't turn to focus on Laura's faint heartbeat. There was no physical contact that he thought he hated, and that she needed. No skin on his, pulse obvious even though it was just a brush of her hand on his. He couldn't close his eyes and exist with someone who was drowning just as he was. It was Derek, and the synthetic memory of everyone he killed.

Urges to turn around, get into his car, and leave were frequent but he kept walking. He was going to pick a spot and sit down, and he would fucking mourn like they did every year. Continuing this ritual _alone_ was the closest thing to punishment he would ever receive, and why not continue it? The only thing losing his last thread of family was, was an extended fuck-up on his account, a thousand times worse but no different. His sister was long gone, existing as one more death that lived in this house and that he was responsible for. Wished he could swap with.

Derek settled in the doorway between their living room and kitchen, finding a comfortable spot to sit and wait. He wouldn't fall asleep in the dark tonight, supporting another body that would lean into him in slumber. This year he would be thrown off balance by his missing crutch. It was only ten thirty in the evening, he had hours for this. However long it would take until he was as burnt as his past. And really, what fucking justice. It was factual. He helped burn his family to the ground and handled the guilt for years with the support of his only survivor. Today he had no one, no more foundation to sift through his grief and share the worst parts.

The reality was that Derek finished the job, really, of killing every last Hale, as opposed to the Argents.

_Kate _fucking_ Argent._

He glanced to his right in hopes of breaking that circular, not to mention frequently traveled train of thought, following the passage of ruined wood right through the back of the house. From here, he could see the moon peering back at him, bright, waning, and mocking.

Sitting here like this was foreign. _Alone_. The guilt was the same, buttery and suffocating, but he'd never been alone in his life. There were always people, not necessarily ones that he wished to surround himself with, but they were present. A large, extended family before the fire, Laura and whatever human friends that latched onto him after it.

She never fixed anything, or made anything alright, but Laura was there and he loved her. The final nail in his coffin was the way she loved him back, how easily she could after he devastated both of their lives. Who did that? Who forgave someone for being the cause of a large-scale family death?

He wanted to make it clear that he never forgave himself for six years ago and he wouldn't. But mostly he wanted his sister back.

*15*

_Derek's car._

I cut my headlights and slowed my jeep, parking right beside him.

_November 21, 2012._

This guy was so predictable.

As I bonelessly slid from my seat, muscles too bushed to complain, I wondered why I was even here. The mourning process was supposed to be a healthy, positive thing that time would heal. And that was probably what normal people would do, mourn and grieve, light a few candles and reach out to family. But of course this was where Derek would banish himself, agonize, blame himself, and do it all in the dark. The guy's default to anything even remotely emotionally difficult was negativity, anger. So as I wobbled my way to the three story husk, I reminded myself that he was probably going to kill me and that I should probably waddle my rubbery limbs back to the jeep.

"Derek?" The tone of my own whisper freaked me out and I clamped my jaw shut. Apparently with muscle exhaustion came alarming hoarseness.

Fortunately, the past two and a half hours of swimming in a dimly lit pool had forced my eyes into nocturnal mode and through squinting, I could find my way through the front door, and even around the main floor. I'd almost completely circled it, ignoring terrible, ominous feelings to run that other people may have heeded, the entire way. I considered surrendering to my own crawling skin and jumpy pulse, might I add, seconds from giving up when I finally saw a figure sitting against the wall separating two unrecognizable living rooms. The figure sat with its legs crossed, elbows on its knees, head supported in its hands. My posture drooped and eyelids prickled by the wave of melancholy that hit me. He was _oozing_ it.

I took a few more cautious steps towards him but stopped a long enough distance away that killing me instantly would require serious acrobatics. He wouldn't look up at me, probably didn't care enough to, but I was kind of glad. The look on his face as he and Erica left the school was empty. Devastated. Mutilated. The worst kind of hell existed in his eyes and it was so transparent that I could've drawn it on paper. It was like he ran out of every emergency reserve that could've hidden it, and I didn't know how to look back at him.

"Derek," I tried again, contemplating sitting down.

"What the _fuck_ do you want?"

The fact that I was 'taken aback' was a massive understatement. It was his voice but I didn't recognize it. _Quiet, strained, perhaps slightly disbelieving._ All I could do was open my mouth and close it, desperately searching for words.

"A thank-you?" He laughed, voice dripping with bitter sarcasm.


	6. Drowning 6

Oops. I accidentally finished it.

As well, I barely edited; it's 4am. Pretend the mistakes aren't there.

*16* -years before-

_ Derek sat numbly on the ground, back firmly against the couch. There was a glowing digital clock straight across from him that he stared at unblinkingly, but he didn't see it. Behind the glassy lens of his eyes were flames licking the heels of familiar faces lost a year ago, and one other, flameless, that he nauseously remembered._

Loose, golden brown curls. Olive skin. Straight, strikingly white teeth and a wide smile. A cross-bow. Deceiving eyebrows and a secret motive.

_ Alone in the darkening room, a 17-year old Derek grimaced, holding his breath at his aching bones. Why did everything _hurt_ today?_

_ And what was today, a Monday? He'd taken it off. Just another Monday he wasn't sure why he bothered trudging through._

_ A door slammed violently a room away, interrupting his thoughts and Derek's pulse leapt with it. _

_ "Derek?" His sister called. She sounded worried but he didn't answer, instead let her follow his thundering heartbeat._

_ "Derek," Laura called quietly, standing feet away with bag full of what smelled like text books and car keys in her hand. "You've been here all day?"_

_ Glancing up at her with dead eyes, he sighed. All he wanted to do anymore was apologize, urge only magnified today. One year later. _November 21st_. But he could never get the words out._

_ After a dull thud and jangling, Laura settled on Derek's left, knees tucked up to her chin, touching his own knee and heartbeat impossibly steady. She leaned into him, placing a hand at his neck to turn his head and whisper support in his ear. That she loved him. That it was alright. That she missed them too. _

_ "We should fly back to see Peter," Laura murmured once she let go of Derek and rested her head against his shoulder._

_ How long they sat like that neither kept track, the only thing interrupting the silence Derek's unsteady breaths._

A panic attack?_ He wondered. _That's new_._

_ As his body attempted to betray him, Laura rumbled softly. "It'll get better."_

_ He had to clear his throat shakily before speaking, coming out with a weak, "No. No it won't. It'll never be better."_

_ Thankfully, she was quiet until he calmed down, drawing circular patterns into the clothed flesh above his knee with her thumb. He was still getting used to her alpha-status, but the dread that filled her splashed him in the face directly. It was such a strong transference that he snapped his head towards her in alarm. _

_ "Will do you promise me something?" Laura whispered, hand stilling. She only continued when Derek nodded stiffly, murmuring, "When you feel like this and I can't sit with you, wait a day."_

_ The air in the room froze at her words. He couldn't look at her, staying silent and questioning. _No way she could've picked up on such a mechanical thought-

_ "Just a day, before you do anything. That's not very long. I need you, I don't want to lose you too. Remember that, okay?" _

_ In her theory she was adamant, stubborn and discerning, so Derek nodded again, capturing her fingers in his. "Alright."_

*17* -**the present, a continuation of *15***-

"Wh- I," I stammered, eyes wide as if it would help me read the words I wanted to get out. Tongue-tied wasn't usually my thing.

"_Thanks._"

I could deal with bad attempts to get rid of me. Especially when it came to sarcastic thank-you's. In fact, it was somewhat my specialty these days. I remained. "That's not what I came for."

Neither of us spoke; he was presently trying to ignore me and I thought I'd give it a minute before continuing. He was statue-still, breaths silent, posture desolate, just the same as when I disturbed him. At times like this I really did wish I could be a werewolf, because all I wanted was to listen to Derek's pulse. I didn't understand what was going on across from me, in what I thought was literally an emotionless shell of a person.

A montage of memories struck me very suddenly, and very hard as I waited. This was the same Derek that burst into his uncle's hospital ward to get me out, searched the woods for god knows how long so he could bury his sister with all of that precision and affection, tried to mentor Scott and really he still tried, saved me from Isaac, prevented an unpleasant comatose situation –granted, that had been his own packmate's fault-, and turned his back on a creature that struck fear into his own eyes just to get me, _an obstacle_, to run.

Even though I couldn't see his face the darkness, I _saw_ it. Everything about him after Scott yanked us out of that pool was different. His face and skin had been flushed from the cold, usually hard jaw slack, frown lines smooth, and eyes wider than usual with what I saw now was devastation.

"I know what happened," I said after a suitable pause. "Exactly what happened."

My eyes waited for his to meet them, but they never did. He was unresponsive. "Perks of having a father in the police force."

I paused again in preparation of phrasing my next thought. It had to be done right, or tonight would be counterproductive, my presence damaging. "I know you miss her."

_Nothing._

"Know how my mom died?" I licked my lips uncomfortably. I'd only ever had to recount this to one person before. "I was fourteen. Some neighbourhood scumbags picked our front door. It's pretty typical after that. Mother wakes up, father doesn't. Mother hears noise and decides to investigate. Mother walks in on burglary, mother gets shot."

Derek didn't say anything, but he leaned rather cautiously back against the wall and placed a hand on each thigh, like he was trying to regain control.

Nausea nipped at my heels from the memory, or maybe it was the influx of nagging fear.

_ Trying to control himself from…_

"I know you miss Laura because I remember how it felt when I lost my mother."

I waited, and what I got was more silence.

_Like I'm a ghost_.

He shifted in his spot a little and ran his fingers through his hair. They were trembling just like mine were after the Kanima killed my mechanic.

"You think you can relate to me? That's why you're here?"

I shut my eyes against his tone of voice and tried to breathe steadily to soothe my hammering heart. This wouldn't deter me. No way a little sarcasm wouldn't deter me. It just wouldn't. I'd _seen_ his face an hour ago. I'd felt his agony in the water, the way his body had gone limp in defeat; felt the way he expected me to leave him at the bottom of the pool and his borderline… disappointment, when I didn't. There was something in him and I saw it clearly. I would see it again tonight.

"You don't like me. We're not friends. Fine. But when my mom died, man, it didn't matter how many '_friends_'," I added air quotations here, "surrounded me as comfort. I wanted someone who knew what it felt like."

If I hadn't spent the past couple hours in near-silence, my ears wouldn't have been adjusted right to pick it up. But at the end of my sentence, Derek exhaled, so quietly, audibly, shakily.

_Oh._

I completely lost whatever speech I'd carefully planned beforehand on why he shouldn't spend the anniversary of his family's death this way. Instead I focused on his hands that were still placed flat and carefully on his thighs, like he knew they would shake otherwise. I wondered if it was really just the paralysis that made them that way.

Exchanging my lost train of thought was the irrepressible, not to mention suicidal, urge to _touch_ him. He couldn't just do something like that, react that way, and expect me to walk off merrily. I didn't know what exactly was going on, whether there really was some connection or silent understanding between us, but this was…whatever it was, at its peak. For me, anyway. My curiosity had been begging to get the better of me since I stole all those police files to unearth his past.

_My curiosity for Derek. Fueled by his unwillingness to talk, and doused by his indifference, inhumanity_. What I saw now, frowning at his hands and crossed legs, wasn't an indifferent wolf. Hell, I recognized it.

He was a boy that lost his family, and he hated himself for it.

"She never blamed you, did she," I stated, rather than asked.

_Laura Hale, _the article in the file had read, _local sweetheart, born leader, family-motivated._ I recited those words back to myself while I watched- in slow motion- the shadow of Derek stand and approach me.

_This is it. _I shut my eyes and braced myself; held my breath; tried to become one with the wall when I felt my back make crushing contact with it. Again. There was no feigning bravery like the last time I made Derek snap. I turned my head sideways into the wall, flinching away, eyes sealed, fear turning my blood into tiny spears of ice. I was afraid.

_ "Say one more word and it's your blood on this floor." _

_Not a desirable consequence,_ I decided. But with his teeth so close to my carotid artery, I didn't waste my breath.

"If she doesn't, why do you?" It wasn't particularly gracefully stated, my teeth kind of clenched, voice low and barely venturing from its box, my general purpose becoming foggy the longer I was held. I had spoken quickly, desperate to ask. _So what if it ends my life?_

Ghosting over my entire body was the warm, sticky sensation of blood dribbling down my skin and seeping into my clothes in large volumes. My head was filled with cold water and I couldn't think. I wasn't even sure if I was still breathing. The more time crept by, the more I bled, the more I drowned, the more worked up I became. We were so close, closer than in the pool in a literal and figurative sense, and somehow on top of my petrifying alarm at his ferocity was still the desire to touch him.

It ended quickly enough, the bottoms of my feet striking the floor with tiny pinpricks of pain shooting up my shins, the blood a nasty allusion that evaporated instantly.

_Not dead. _

When I finally had the valour to open my eyes, Derek was about six feet away. _Like his outburst even alarmed him._ "I killed my family, Stiles."

His tone, the way he said my name, made me have to scold my knees into continuing to hold me up, silhouette permanently engrained into my mind. I wanted to reach out and trace his slack shoulders, turn his exposed palms inward, hold his unsteady fingers still.

"_They_ killed them," I corrected quietly. _The fucking Argents._

Less audible than his sigh earlier was perhaps a small, broken sound, emitted as Derek slid back down the wall to his spot. It snapped me like a twig, and before any permission was given for my body to move, it was on the floor beside him.

Something felt final about the way I sat next to him, legs also crossed and hip-to-hip. Conversation was meaningless now, the waters having calmed, draining away from my throat until I could breathe. The warmth of Derek's body was familiar, our positioning similar to a few hours ago. I could feel his heartbeat, and this, somehow, no longer felt strange.

What had I compared him to a week ago? _Reinforced steel?_

_ A distant memory._

I let my hand skim over his, which was flat and tense on his knee, on its way to fold in my lap. An involuntary sigh of relief later and I was leaning into him. Derek neither moved away nor nearer, just angled his body toward me in support as if he was used to this.

_Sitting and waiting. _

My entire right side now flush against Derek's, I relaxed. For once, I didn't question this unnatural comfort, nor the delight I took in his scent. Always so distinct and appealing, unique and his own; the kind of fragrance that cohered to clothing, sheets, and especially skin. At this proximity, inhaling deeply was equivalent to pressing my nose to his neck.

Settling for leaning my head back against the crumbling wall, I shut my eyes at the feeling of Derek sliding his hand from _on top_ his knee to rest it on the outside, making light contact with my own less than an inch away.

And at this moment, we were two grieving souls, but we were perfectly afloat.


End file.
